I Really Hate Myself For Doing This
By The Talking Dog has another of his terrific interviews with lawyers representing Gitmo detainees, this one with Robert Rachlin. As an aside, I was struck by this:
Pat Leahy is co-sponsoring a bill to amend the Military Commissions Act to restore habeas corpus with Sen. Arlen Specter. I don’t know where that stands, but certainly, as Leahy and Specter are respectively the chairman and ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, it will surely get a committee hearing.
It’s really nice that Specter wants to restore habeas rights. What would have been even nicer is if he had used his position as chair of the Judiciary Committee to stop it from passing in the first place. Or at a minimum he could have not voted for the goddamned thing. As far as I can tell, Specter’s alleged civil libertarian credentials rest on 1)casting a (non-decisive) vote against Robert Bork, and 2)otherwise engaging in lots of self-aggrandizing hand-wringing before voting to gut people’s rights. (Cf. especially his behavior at the Thomas hearings.)